Power: Why Some People Have It Book

This is one of those books that should be considered a must read! If you've ever wondered why someone gets promoted over you or why you just can't seem to advance in your career, you should read this.

Power explains why people who aren't very smart or hard working seem to get so far. The first thing you have to realize in business is that, "life isn't fair." Don't expect it to be. I have a phrase that guides me in my working and management decisions: "you can either be right or be effective." Sometimes you can be both, but if you must choose, you should always choose to be effective. What do I mean? I mean it might be a great moral victory to claim that your workers use common sense and don't do X, but if you want to be effective you spell out explicitly DON'T DO X. I hear this a lot from less effective managers, "they should know better than to do that." Maybe they should, but if you want to guarantee they don't do that, you WRITE IT DOWN.

This book essentially takes my right/effective to another level. You can be morally victorious by being a harder worker than that guy who got the promotion, or you can be THAT GUY.

An example of this book in my life: I got a promotion over a co-worker who had been there a year or more longer than me. She claimed once that it was because I "had a penis", implying that the boss was a bit of a misogynist. As I thought about it, I realized that it wasn't because I had a penis, but because I had balls. I'm not afraid to take risks to get my job done. I'm perfectly willing to get in trouble with my bosses by going outside the parameters they set for me, if I think I can get the job done. I have gotten in trouble before. My co-worker won't. You tell her do it this way, she does it that way. I got a promotion, she didn't.

I also will do 5 things adequately rather than one thing perfectly. Many of my co-workers don't. That's not only inefficient, it's a bad way to get noticed. I'm not saying half-ass a project, or get it done with mistakes (and neither does the book), but you should be able to accomplish multiple tasks at at least a minimum level. You can always improve later down the road. Again example from my life: when I was the stock person, we had a level that the shelves were supposed to be stocked at. I would always overstock so that the next day I wouldn't have to stock. This freed me up to work in the accounting office doing data entry for a couple hours a day. Which got me noticed by the owner and led to more money and better position. Everyone in the store hated how I stocked, but again me promotion, them not.

This book has examples such as these and many others on how to get power in your workplace. The one I have started working on since reading the book is networking. Networking is incredibly important. Most executive level jobs are gotten by "who you know", not by putting in an application. We'll see how that pans out.

I must say again: YOU SHOULD READ THIS BOOK!